From the BMW Group Mobility Council to the wider conversation about smart, sustainable, materially-intelligent transportation — a practitioner's view of what the next century of movement will require.
The BMW Group Mobility Council is a small, deliberate circle of global leaders — engineers, scientists, operators, strategists — whose task is to pressure-test the company's long-range view of the mobility system. The Council is not a product committee. It is a conversation about where the automobile, as a physical and cultural object, is going.
Peter's contribution is the long view of an operator who has already built complex, global, materials-intensive businesses at industrial scale — and the discipline of a leader who knows that the answers to the hardest mobility questions will not come from a single breakthrough, but from thousands of compounding ones.
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Convened by BMW Group, the Mobility Council brings together a curated circle of international leaders from outside the automotive industry — from materials, technology, consumer devices, energy, finance and design — to challenge, sharpen and widen the company's thinking about the vehicle, the customer and the mobility system of the future.
Interrogate every assumption about what a car, a city and a commute will be in twenty years.
Import insight from adjacent industries — materials, devices, software, industrial design.
Advise on the long-cycle decisions — engineering, materials, platforms — that shape decades.
The mobility system of the next century will be architected across three interlocking layers — each with its own physics, its own economics and its own ethical weight.
The next vehicle will be defined by the chemistry of its battery pack, the optical clarity of its driver interfaces, and the ceramic intelligence of its thermal systems. Materials will not be a supporting act. They will be the plot.
The vehicle is being redrawn as a connected, software-defined, energy-aware machine — one whose value accrues as much from its updates as from its assembly line. A new industrial logic is required to produce it.
Where the logic of the vehicle meets the logic of the data center.
Trust, legibility, dignity — the experience layer of mobility is fundamentally a materials question.
“The automobile is being re-authored — in silicon, in software and in a dozen new materials. Whoever masters the manufacturing of that combination will write the next chapter of mobility.”— Peter F. Volanakis
The windshield of the next decade will be part optical system, part heads-up display, part sensor housing, part solar surface. The companies that treat it as simple glass will lose to the companies that treat it as system.
Every serious EV question — range, cost, safety, lifecycle — resolves into a materials question. The automakers who learn to think like materials companies will set the pace of the transition.
The vehicle's software roadmap must be built on an industrial roadmap — hardware that is modular, testable, and updatable through the life of the vehicle, not just at the moment of production.
The real competition of the next decade is not between cars. It is between systems — the integrated networks of vehicle, grid, road, data, identity and policy that will decide which cities actually move.